


Asomatous

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 08:24:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14828784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: The dizzy sensation of the body changing under her hands, and his hands, and everyone’s hands.(Rachel and sex and the body and DYAD: a study.)





	Asomatous

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: objectification, underage sex, rape (rachel having sex with her monitors without their consent, rachel being pushed into sex without her consent), ferdinand & everything that comes with that, nonconsensual invasive medical procedures, animal death, autopsy, dissociation, dysphoria, abuse, mild self-harm]
> 
> _Holding onto nothing, scared of the edge / you’re floating with something that’s already dead / you’re frozen stuck inside your head / you’re floating like something that’s already dead / you’re already dead_

Rachel sees a tape of 415K98 masturbating before she even thinks to try it.

In those days they use an empty DYAD office to play her tapes from the subjects’ bedrooms – girls (and a few boys) getting dressed, doing homework, having girls (and a few boys) over, dreaming. Rachel takes notes and tries to offer her own insight. These are the days when she is still certain that there will be a right answer, and that if she finds the right answer she will be rewarded for it. Her notepads are filled with a desperate scrawl of meaning. None of it will ever be the right answer – but she doesn’t know that yet.

It looks like it hurts, mostly. 415K98 bucks under the covers, making small sounds and sighing. She is thirteen years old. Rachel is thirteen years old. Rachel’s monitor, standing against the back wall, is about thirty-two. (She can’t tell.) Doctor Leekie is forty-one; when 415K98 stops making sounds he rewinds the tape and starts it over again. A spot of blood dots Rachel’s notepad. Oh: she is picking her cuticles to bits. Bad habit. Terrible habit. (The pain is the only real thing in the room.)

The tape stops again. Doctor Leekie clears his throat. “So?” he says.

So.

Rachel tries masturbating, but she isn’t very good at it and she doesn’t like trying things she’s not good at. Mostly, it hurts. She tries thinking about Brad Pitt and her monitor and Marion Bowles and the lingerie shop she’d walked by once and none of it does anything. Her mind sputters. When she closes her eyes there is a room, and Doctor Leekie is sitting in the room, and Rachel is onscreen rutting against her fingers and staring blankly at the ceiling. So? So? So, Rachel? What are your thoughts?

She wipes her fingers on the sheets. She rolls over, hugs her arms around herself and waits for the sick feeling to stop.

It never really stops.

Once a month Rachel is taken into a lab and the body is measured. They take blood. They ask her to open up her mouth and her eyes and her ears and they probe inside to see what they can find. Sometimes they do more invasive tests, and Rachel holds very still and watches the ceiling and waits for it to stop. (It never really stops.) She runs on treadmills. She lets them stick electrodes to her skull and she watches her brain light up in different colored lines. The body is a list of data points; it opens up like an oyster shell for other people to reach inside. The ceilings in the building are white. Sometimes they are tiled. One of them has a crack in the upper-left corner. It would be nice if Rachel’s body had a crack in it; that would be a place that she could escape from. As it is she has nowhere to run to. She stays still. If she holds her breath, sometimes it doesn’t hurt.

Sometimes she is allowed to watch them put electrodes on the mice and send them running through mazes. The second time Rachel saw a mouse reach a dead end and whirl around, she cried. That was only once – she doesn’t cry anymore – she digs her fingernails into her skin and she doesn’t cry anymore. Crying is a data point. They already have so many data points.

It’s not that she doesn’t still want to cry. She does. She watches the mouse running and running, looking for an exit that isn’t there, bumping off the walls; she wants to cry. If there was a crack the mouse could escape. If there was a crack in the skin of the maze, the mouse could run right out of it and just keep running.

* * *

A nurse explains tampons to her. She rushes through it, giving Rachel too much medical knowledge and not enough comfort. It’s not that Rachel wanted—

It’s not that—

When Rachel was younger she used to imagine Ethan and Susan Duncan were still here and they were helping her with things and they softened the edges of DYAD and made it feel more like a home and helped her with her lessons instead of leaving her sitting up until dawn trying to solve equations three grade levels above her own and they would help her fix her hair into two neat braids instead of Rachel having to do it herself and they would hold her when she cried but that’s so stupid that’s so incredibly stupid they’re dead and Rachel has no one to lean on and she has to stop pretending that anyone is ever going to come for her and that life is ever going to be anything besides this and it doesn’t matter how Susan Duncan would have explained it to her anyways it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter at all.

It really doesn’t matter. Rachel nods at all the right times. She is excused to a bathroom and she rolls the tampon between her fingers, and – because there are no security cameras in the bathroom – she closes her eyes and lets herself sob three times. Then she takes care of it.

It isn’t that bad. Doctors have done worse. This is just life now.

Rachel charts out the development of all the Leda subjects’ menstrual cycles, weighs different influences. Nature? Nurture? It doesn’t matter, none of it is the right answer. She makes a graph, proposes a hypothesis, proves it. It’s not the right answer – no one cares.

Rachel wasn’t the first to start, but she wasn’t the last. Her cramps are no better or worse than any of the Leda subjects. She is squarely in the middle. She hides there, in the middle, she hides in the body in the middle. No one looks at her.

Overall, the body is average. Rachel isn’t average – Rachel has knowledge beyond the Leda subjects, Rachel has power, Rachel is extremely intelligent and she is treated like an adult in most of the ways that matter. It’s just that Rachel lives in this body, and the body in and of itself is unremarkable.

She likes it like that. 292B16 starts her menstrual cycle abnormally early, and DYAD plants in her local hospital give that body extra tests. 442B76 bleeds abnormal amounts, and DYAD scientists put that body through more extreme examination. Rachel has a normal cycle – a cycle within baselines – and they let her body go. They let it run through different mazes, and they take their hands off of it for just one blissful moment.

Rachel runs on the treadmill. Rachel’s body runs on the treadmill. Rachel runs through the blank white mazes of the body, looking looking looking for a place that can hide her.

* * *

She is fifteen when she has to start having sex. She’s planned it – she can’t start abnormally early (907B54) but she also can’t choose not to have sex (3MK29A) which would be its own sort of abnormality. After forty or so Leda subjects have become sexually active, Rachel locks herself alone in a bedroom with her monitor and tells him to take off his clothes.

Her voice cracks. It’s awful.

The ceiling in Rachel’s room is colorless. Sometimes she thinks it’s blue, sometimes she thinks it’s grey. When she tilts her head to the right angle, the light reflects. It doesn’t go anywhere, though. The light stays where it is. It just looks like it’s moving.

Watching the ceiling would be abnormal, so Rachel just considers it and watches her monitor instead. Is there a name for a color between grey and blue? Cadet grey. Steel blue. His face looks angry, or like it’s in pain. She should have gotten naked for this, probably; she hates being naked. Blue bell. Shadow blue. Oh god it hurts. Glaucous. It really hurts. Roman silver, iceberg, she wants it to stop hurting.

* * *

A nurse explains safe sex to her. The same nurse? Possibly. Rachel tries not to remember the faces of the doctors and nurses, because things are easier if she doesn’t think of them as people and instead just thinks of them as one large ambivalent mass with cold hands. The nurse gives her condoms, which is pointless – Rachel is infertile, and she’s certain they test her monitors for sexually transmitted diseases. The nurse doesn’t tell her how to make the body lubricate itself, or what sex is supposed to feel like, or how Rachel can make it stop hurting. To be fair, Susan Duncan probably wouldn’t have explained these things either. Rachel takes the condoms. Rachel takes the pamphlet. Rachel waits two weeks and then opens up her own file to read about sexual orientation and intercourse, the way that all of the things that she wants are within safe parameters. Less than forty percent of the Leda subjects have displayed homosexual inclinations, so she picked the right side. Good. Doctor Leekie sighs at her – he frowns – he doesn’t start giving her female monitors, or take away her monitors, or tell them not to touch her. So it’s fine. She’s normal. Everything about this is normal.

She wishes it didn’t hurt.

Rachel apologizes to the body in the shower, touches her hands gently to the curves and bones of it. It still hurts – probably just to spite her. It’s starting to bloom as puberty changes it, and every time she looks down she thinks of the bodies of the mice once they grew up. The way they split open under scalpels. The arteries, the veins, the dull unthumping mass of the heart; Rachel’s breasts growing to a weight she can hold in her hands, Rachel’s hips flaring out into a shape her latest monitor likes to rest his palms on during. The dizzy sensation of the body changing under her hands, and his hands, and everyone’s hands.

She doesn’t like looking at it in the shower anymore. She can touch it – she has to touch it – she cleans it, and she tries not to look at it. Other people are already looking at it. Not just doctors, now: the men who pass her in the hallways, the men on the board (she is finally allowed to sit on the board) (this should be a victory) (it _is_ a victory, no matter where their eyes go), the men in the labs watching her run on treadmills. They measure her, clinically, to make sure the bras they’re ordering fit her. The mouse of Rachel runs through the maze of Rachel – and there’s nowhere to go, there’s nowhere to hide. The shape of the maze changes, grows curves, becomes a labyrinth. Rachel buries herself into her brain instead; she runs through colors. She’s on greens now. Jungle green, grey green, lime.

She pulls on skirts and she learns to walk in heels; they wouldn’t order her men’s shoes even if she asked for them, and she doesn’t ask for them, so she has no choice but to learn. She shaves the mouse fur from her skin until it shivers. She paints her lips pink and red, like fresh insides. She learns the right way to smile.

* * *

This pays off at age seventeen, with Ferdinand Chevalier.

She knows about the man coming from Topside to clean up all the anomalous Leda subjects. (Thirty.) (British.) (A cleaner.) (A killer.) She knows the way he looks at her, the way he lingers too long in shaking her hand, the way his tongue darts out to touch his lips. She understands these things, in the way she is beginning to understand these things.

Rachel knows the path through the maze; she knows the rules. The button to press for food, the button to avoid. The way that anomalies cannot be borne, the way that the Leda subjects in Helsinki are anomalies, the way that the Leda subjects in Helsinki must be eradicated. She knows what it means, when Ferdinand’s palm sweats against her palm. Men’s hands: the way they sit against her skin like raw meat. She understands them.

The men with their hands and their eyes and their mouths eat the body alive and spit Rachel out. She opens her body’s mouth and speaks at a board meeting and they all stare at her, like her voice is some sort of blasphemous miracle.

Then they make her leave the room.

Like a child.

They understand the adulthood of the body, but they still think she’s a child – she hates them – she clenches her hands together and feels the curdling echo of Ferdinand’s sweat against her skin and she understands. She understands. She understands. She really does understand.

After the board meeting ends, Rachel locks herself alone in a bedroom with Ferdinand Chevalier and takes his raw-meat hands in hers, puts them onto the curves of her breasts. Dissection. Ferdinand’s suit is a dark blue, indigo maybe. She hopes the pounding of her heart is exactly the way a heart is supposed to pound, when a man touches you, when a man touches you and he is dressed in indigo and he is a key you can turn in a lock to open a door that leads out of here.

Ferdinand’s mouth opens, wet and pink. He says, in a low whisper: “Hit me.”

Their hands, entwined, stutter.

He says it again, and then it all tumbles out: that Rachel is beautiful, that Rachel is perfect, that he wants her to hurt him, to tie him up, to treat him like a dog. His hands are sweating through the fabric of her blouse; his eyes are wide and dark. Rachel grabs her uncertainty in both hands and breaks it. She drops his fingers and tells him to get on his knees.

He does. Like a dog. Panting like a dog – terrible – she hits him in the face. The print of his hand on her breast, the print of her hand on his cheekbone. He laughs; it’s giddy. She hits him again. She hits him again. She hits him—

He grabs her wrist and tells her _no_.

The truth is that Ferdinand is not any sort of escape – Ferdinand is another section of maze, with his own set of rules. He wants her to hit him just enough to get his cock hard, and not enough to actually make him afraid. He wants a domesticated animal. It’s not that she’d thought otherwise. It would have been stupid to think otherwise. Rachel isn’t violent, she’s beautiful. She’s perfect. Everyone wants her, in one way or another. That’s good.

Ferdinand buys the body pretty things: corsets and necklaces and lingerie, cuffs and canes and riding crops. Rachel is hairless like a child; she is beautiful like a woman; she is violent like an animal; she is so very easy to tame. Ferdinand loves her, or at least whatever her he thinks he’s looking at. Rachel sends him screaming in hotel rooms where there are no cameras. In exchange, he tells her about Helsinki. It’s just business.

* * *

The next time Rachel’s monitor tries to touch her, she grabs his wrist and tells him _no_.

Then she hits him.

He doesn’t like it as much as Ferdinand does, but when Rachel stops to consider it she thinks she likes that better. She likes the way his mouth tightens, the way his hands twitch; she likes trapping him in his own body, her voice a leash around his neck. It feels good. It feels good. She watches him take off his shirt, she strokes her hands down the planes of his chest and builds a labyrinth out of him. She fills his mouth up with her fingers and fills his ears up with her voice and then she straddles him, takes him inside of her. It hurts. It’s good. It hurts. It’s good. She digs her nails into his shoulders until the skin breaks, and he hisses in pain from all of her wounds.

* * *

Rachel is nineteen. She is in the apartment that DYAD has bought her. She is in the shower that DYAD has bought her. She is rocking against the fingers that

are pushing her, inch by stubborn inch, closer to orgasm. Her mind fills up to the brim with shower steam. She can see distant shapes through the fog, but the blessing of hot showers is that you don’t have to look at anything if you don’t want to.

Afterwards, she scrubs the body down with expensive soaps and scrubs that peel its skin off to reveal newer and more beautiful skin underneath. _I’m sorry_ , she thinks, or she forgets to think, or she deliberately disregards. Whatever she thinks – after that, she steps out of the shower. She wipes the fog from the mirror with one hand and looks at the face. The eyes blink when she blinks; the mouth opens when she parts its lips. She puts a finger into the mouth and sucks on it and the cheeks in the mirror hollow. Her cheeks hollow. Her body. She tries it, rolling the thought over: _my body_. It doesn’t stick.

She keeps eye contact with the mirror as she uses the blow dryer to coax stubborn curls into a smooth wave. She paints on makeup; the pupils in the mirror widen, contract, vanish when she blinks. She’s still naked – with the steam beginning to ebb out of the bathroom, she can see most of the body in the mirror. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s very good at hurting other people. It is, in theory, _Rachel’s_ body – cultivated at every turn, different from all the other bodies out there somewhere. Her body. Her body. Her body her body hers.

She puts down the hair dryer and splays her palm flat against the mirror. “Beautiful,” she whispers, and the word is completely hollow.

* * *

Three Leda subjects fall ill with a respiratory disease that’s somehow linked to the Leda uterus and the Leda infertility and Rachel pulls her monitor’s belt off and hits him with it – with the buckle – on accident – on purpose. He bleeds. She makes him strip and makes him sit and watches his cock harden as she stands there and stares at him and the body is covered up by something more beautiful and soft than a hospital gown and Rachel lowers herself onto his cock and rides it and she bites his neck, she bites his neck, she bites his throat. She isn’t going to cry; there’s nothing to cry about. Rachel isn’t sick. Rachel has a body, and the body isn’t sick; and she has her monitor, and his body, and she can make that body do whatever she wants. That’s her body, really – the toy that she can move and pose and break however she’d like to. If it falls apart, she’ll just get another one.

If it falls apart. Not that the body is going to fall apart – but if it does – there are more of it. There are hundreds more of it out there. Of her monitor. If that body fell apart she could replace it with another body, and it wouldn’t even matter.

There really isn’t anything to cry about. Aldous will have the test results back soon, from the pap smear, the one that he did to the body in his office, he’ll have those results back, and then Rachel will know about the disease. She’ll know if her body has it – if there’s a monster in the center of the labyrinth that she really thought she knew by heart.

God, she can’t be crying. She refuses to be crying. She digs her nails into her monitor’s skin, screams it out through her teeth. It hurts. It hurts. She grinds down faster, harder, feels the dry burn. The colposcope was ice cold inside of her. The doctor had ignored her, except to tell her that it would pinch; Aldous ignored her, which isn’t fair. It’s just not _fair_.

She rides her monitor for a long time – she fucks the body with her body or she fucks her body with the body or, anyways, there are bodies and Rachel is in the middle of them. It’s fine.

It’s fine.

Everything is _fine_.

528M32 falls sick with the brand-new Leda disease and it eats her body alive. She coughs up blood. Her monitor takes notes, and Aldous takes notes on those notes – late at night, his office the only lit-up thing in the building. If Rachel was a child she would imagine that he’s doing it for her, but thankfully she isn’t a child anymore. Aldous doesn’t do anything for her. Aldous was on the board when they removed her – Aldous saw her report on menstrual cycles and ignored it – Aldous was cruel enough to let her believe there was ever going to be a right answer.

There isn’t. Rachel finds reason after reason why 528M32’s body may be turning against her, and they are all soundly rejected. At night she goes home and holds her breath, just in case the tickle in her throat turns into a cough and rips the blood right out of her.

(She dreams about it sometimes. On the edge of waking. Rachel dead; the body cut open on a dissection table, and Aldous walking a line of old grey men through the divination of it. _With this body dead we can save all of the others_ , he says. They all applaud. Rachel wakes – showers – turns the water up blisteringly high and scrubs every inch of the body clean.)

It’s lucky, really, that they have a body in such close reach. They don’t test the more invasive cures on Rachel, but they take blood and they probe and they wire the body up for treadmills with such familiarity that they may as well never have stopped. She can fight back with her packed schedule – meetings, conferences, video calls – but at the end of the day the body’s usefulness takes priority over Rachel’s usefulness. They drag the body back down to the labs, and they drag Rachel with it.

God. It never really stops.

528M32 gets sicker. She staggers from shelter to shelter, unable to afford healthcare, and Rachel opens up the files Aldous doesn’t want to show her and reads the results from every body she can find. The days blur into a nauseating seesaw of routine: the nightmare the waking the cleaning the working the testing the sleeping the nightmare, again. She gets used to it. When she was a child she thought she’d never get used to it, but thankfully she isn’t a child anymore.

More subjects fall ill. The body watches Rachel back from the mirror, stoic; it keeps its secrets too well, she can’t find if there’s a sickness in it. The doctors can’t scrape it out and her monitor can’t fuck it out and it comes back in Rachel’s dreams, over and over and over—

Anyways, 528M32 dies. The disease doesn’t kill her but she dies and, anyways, she’s a body and that body is on Rachel’s autopsy table. Rachel pulls gloves on, picks up the scalpel, breathes in – one – breathes out – two. She digs scalpel into skin. She cuts through.

She’d died more slowly than Rachel was expecting. 528M32. It had taken her a while to die. The overdose took her in stages, rolling over her like electric waves. Rachel hadn’t thought it would last a few minutes – 528M32’s body jumping and twitching and Rachel sitting there twisting her hands together and not making a single move to stop it. She shouldn’t think about that. She doesn’t know what to think about. The room is very quiet when she cuts down. 528M32 is very quiet. When she was alive, she’d sang, but she isn’t alive anymore. Should she think about 528M32 being alive? Probably not. What should she think about. The sound the skin makes when it peels back is terrible; it’s an anguish of revealing. Rachel hears her breathing speed up. She hates it. She fumbles for the tools to pin this body open.

With the skin wide open, the organs splay out in front of her. Rachel is the oracle. The corpse’s eyes are closed. Rachel is the only one watching. Rachel can see. Rachel can see that on the inside, the body is still wet and pink. Rachel thinks about Ferdinand’s mouth. She shouldn’t think about that either. There are growths on the inside of this body, all along the flesh. Like pearls in the oyster shell of it. It must have hurt, when 528M32 died; it must have been hurting for weeks, as this body grew its own secretive garden all along the pink insides of her. It must have been unbearable.

Rachel knows all of this. Rachel understands exactly how much it must have hurt.

She cuts down anyways.

In the basement of DYAD, she takes the body apart. She peels open every dark place with scalpels and gloved fingers and she pries secrets out of it, writes a report that – god – in some stupid childish place she really believes is the right answer. Like this, somehow, will finally be enough – to reduce the body to data and splay it out in front of Aldous like an offering. Imagine if they could get all the answers they needed from this body. Imagine if they would finally leave Rachel’s body completely alone.

When she’s working the needle through the cold rubber-flesh of the chest, she gets hit with a memory. This happens less and less, these days: as she gets older, as she becomes an adult, as she stops needing – well. As she stops needing.

But in the back of her mind she remembers herself, fifteen years old, standing in the shower and crying. Pressing palm to stomach like holding in a gut wound, whispering _I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m so sorry_.

Her hands don’t shake, as she pulls the thread through and ties the knot. Her hands don’t shake afterwards. She pulls up the blank white sheet over the blank white face of the body and she puts it on the gurney and she wheels it through the eerie silent hallways of the DYAD building. She passes all of it – the laboratories, the examination rooms, the rows and rows of empty cages where they used to keep the mice. One of the wheels on the gurney squeaks frantically as she goes; it’s the only sound, besides the empty echo of high heels on the ground.

She pushes the body into the elevator. The doors close. The box starts rising, and Rachel is rising – somewhere in the middle of all of this, she is rising. She stares at the distant underwater ripple of a face reflected in the elevator. She looks at the shape under the sheet. She looks back at the face. She looks away from both of them, to watch the elevator carry her higher and higher and higher.

Rachel shifts her unshaking grip on the autopsy report. When the elevator doors open, she drags the body out into the light.

**Author's Note:**

> LEEKIE: Oh, my God, Rachel. You killed her.  
> RACHEL: While you were sitting on your hands waiting for her to die naturally, when we need a cure! I won't be shut out of my medical file. It's my body.
> 
> Thanks for reading. Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed.


End file.
